New Universe

The universe reset is at the usual time of 1PM server time. However North America has entered their summer time, making this 1PM EDT, for the UK players (who enter summer time next weekend) this is 5PM (GMT), not the usual 6PM. Here’s an countdown timer Bobbo setup: click here.

Hober Mallow

Arctia, Vulcan, Mira and The Jungle are being tweaked to be more difficult for their appropriate level. This means that players who are at that level should seek out other people to do the content with. This was done by increasing the strength of the bosses, and by adding a very small Aggro radius to the minions within these Dungeons.

Kalthi Depths is currently a little too easy, and a little too hard at the same time. AI like Corrupted Battleships and Corrupted Cruisers are far too difficult to take down, and lower danger factor AI like regular Kalthi ships are too easy. Expect outliers to be buffed or nerfed accordingly.

Pixel

Pixel has been updating the skill tree section with these wounderful images!

Micropatch 03.18.2017

* Updated turret positions for the Pax Stratos
* GSAs are no longer pilotable and have been removed from the drop table
+ Subspace missions are introduced to players from level 1 in Brigands Stronghold and Sol, depending on their faction choice. The AI that spawn during invasions have very high experience modifiers in the Ekam arm, giving players 10x the experience for killing those AI. This tapers off to 2x the experience in the Sas arm. These missions tell the player that Subspace is a Premium only zone and has accelerated experience.
* Fixed more Fighter related mission description errors.
* Made the description of the Fleet focus text shorter for now, until the text wrapping issue is fixed.
* Fixed Grubby Life Drone for Termites.
* Fixed another mission typo related to St. Bernard fighters.
* Roaming minibosses in the Sas and Pajca arm should now be of the appropriate level and difficulty.
* Updated the visual of the new Support Drone, Forward Operating Base and Combat Focus Drone related to The Nexus.
+ Changed Wild Warp Beacon team from Earthforce to Earthforce Transwarp Network.
* AI Base consumption rates for Steel Girders, Fusion Cells and Sentient Chatbots increased by 20%
* Fixed the Dark Fighter Defender Blueprint.
* Increased the number of Wreckages dropped from higher Danger Factor Kalthi Depths AI.
* Made Greenish Fighter Generator not sticky.

Micropatch 03.17.2017

* Fixed some more client crashes
* Fixed an issue that caused a slowdown on amd rx480 gpu (and probably other modern gpu) when multiple lasers were on screen.
* Fixed mission that was rewarding space blue delta fighters instead of a generator
* Fixed wild slaves with too many capacitors, again
* Chid Adiz Mardana drones no longer use too much electricity when firing their weapons.
* The Paxian Stronghold mission “A Fair Trade” no longer has a chance to reward the player with nothing.
* Perilium’s drop chance has been reduced, while the Perilium Blueprint’s drop chance has been increased.
* Subspace invasions happen more frequently in the higher arms, with invasions happening as quickly as every 2 days in the Sas arm.
* Subspace Monthly missions now require twice as many Outposts killed as before, due to invasions happening more frequently.
* Many missions involving Fighter Generators have now been addressed. Players should be able to obtain Generators for the fighters they previously were able to acquire.
* Chihuahua’s and Wingships should no longer be offset from their hull.
* Mini Mad Scientist is now a Support Freighter instead of a Heavy Fighter, along with some other slight stat changes.
* Updated Berserker skill tree image.
* Updated Seer skill tree image.
* Updated Sniper skill tree image.
* Updated Speed Demon skill tree image.
* Updated Engineer skill tree image.
* Updated Fleet Commander skill tree image.
* Updated Gunner skill tree image.
* Updated Monkey skill tree image.
* Chihuahua’s and Wingships should no longer be offset from their hull.

Micropatch 03.16.2017

* Lowered Rosbulk hull space from 1100 to 1000 and speed from 40 to 32.
* Added support focus skill tree image.
* Added fleet focus skill tree image.
* Adjusted new base extractors from basebound to sticky.
* Made the blueprints for the new base extractors to 10 extractors instead of 1.
* Increased the Cleft Claw to level 1200 and improved damage output.
* Increased Drop missile size.
+ Added/Fixed Base Gear Blueprint Packs to Free Market and Acropolis.
* Fixed blueprint base packs with invalid Defender, Platform and Assault drone blueprints.
* Fixed the ship details window damage calculations for crit
* Improved how the Deathblossom selects the origin for lasers
+ Buffed the difficulty and drop rates of Arctia, Vulcan, Mira, and the Jungle. The AI are also set to aggressive, and will attack players if they come within 200 distance.
* Kalthi/Kalthi Wrathful and Kalthi Armored AI have received tuning changes, buffing many of them.
* Corrupted Battleships and Cruisers no longer have insane regeneration, but have been given new tricks and tools instead. The other Corrupted AI have been buffed defensively.
* Precarium and Hazardium Blueprints have been turned into Perilium Blueprints. You will no longer need Hazardium or Precarium at all.

Micropatch 03.15.2017

* Reduced the sizes on the Burst line of weapons more towards last uni’s values
* Lowered sebastopol self damage back to 100%, reduced the sebastopol base DPE modifier to 0.6 from 0.7 and decreased Power/Size modifer from 0.25 to 0.2
* Fixed fighters not being transwarped.
* Adjusted new base extractors from basebound to sticky.
* Made the blueprints for the new base extractors to 10 extractors instead of 1.
* Radar skill no longer gives +10 vision per level.
* No longer checking if a wild slave has too many capacitors equipped. AIs and wild slaves are allowed to cheat.

Micropatch 03.14.2017

* Fixed a potential source of freezing on the client.
* Fixed an issue with some wild slaves activation
* Lowered Resist of roaming Twisted Fate of Death.
* Lowered interference from the center suns of Twisted zone to allow players to autopilot to the center ai base.
* Reduced the damage modifier of Twisted Blaster tech 21 and 22.
* Updated pick your focus image.
* Adjusted Googly Eyes to look better on more ships.
* Moved Faranji Flower Power’s in the missileshotguns.xml file, and changed both of them to be bigger with more range. Also got rid of their spray effect in favor of a mutalisk effect.
* Darkness Warmed Over is bigger, with more DPS as a result.
* Updated initial Focus image in skill tree.
* Updated Combat Focus image in skill tree.
* Updated Recon Focus image in skill tree.
* Fixed a mistype in skill tree Recon description.
* Reduced, Fixed Titanium module Manhour requirement.
* Increased the build costs of the Jungle ships dramatically.
* Decreased the drop rates of the Armored and Wrathful blueprints from their respective AI in Kalthi Depths.
* Moved Perpetual Motion to Earthforce Space, in Danger Factor 20.
* Changed sebastopols. Fixed calculations involving self damage, removed +15% DPS/Tech modifier. Increased base power
* Sped up all Space Urchins by 100 speed.
* Moved Faranji Flower Power’s in the missileshotguns.xml file, and changed both of them to be bigger with more range. Also got rid of their spray effect in favor of a mutalisk effect.
* Darkness Warmed Over is bigger, with more DPS as a result.
* Fixed Space Urchins tractor beam to remain when Raddex.
* Hantr Psu: -15% Range (50 to 35), -10% critical chance (40 to 30)
* Twisted Death Augmenter: +10% Range (40 to 50), +100% Radar (0 to 100)
* Adjusted the resistances of Solarian, Mercurian and Venusian Drones dramatically.
* Toned down many T21 and T22 drones DPS (Twisted Drones and the Subspace drones).
* Buffed Bursts and Sebastapol’s DPS by increasing their self damage (Also increased the bonus DPS added to missileshotguns.xml and sebastapols.xml by self damage from .35 to .5)
* Nerfed the Demolishing and Neutralizing pulse guns DPS, but buffed their DPE.

Fullpatch 03.11.2017

Beta Client Changes

* hundreds of different crash fixes.
* fix for some engine particles
* improvement to the projectile rendering

Content Changes

+ Split up Twisted Zone wormholes and introduced a key system, with some additional missions as a bonus.
+ Pushed Rock Hudson from 40 to 80 danger factor minimal.
+ Increased the level of roaming Stella’s to level 1400.
+ Increased the levels of the Earthforce roaming capital ships.
+ Paxian Grand Reinforcement extraction rate has been reduced.
+ Changed Umbra requirement for tractoring skill from 50 to 30.
+ Increase Holy Ward drop rate by a tiny fraction.
+ Reduced Speedy Gonzales from 30mins respawn time to 10mins.
+ Instanced Hallway to Mother boss.
+ Added more gear drops to Hawk and Roc AI’s.
+ Added drops to Earthforce capital ship roamers around the EF layer.
+ Increased Pirate Maboule spawner spawn amount from 1 to 2.
+ Added Space Urchins to Perilous Space.
+ Added Mr. The Prefect as a spawner in Wolf 359.
+ Added Fly Swatters to low level dungeons.
+ Added Ice Hunter Picks to Perilous Layer.
+ Low level Nexus AI are now capture-able
+ Added Attached Warp Beacon blueprint to Beta Antares.
* Tier 2 and 3 Industrial Commodities no longer require the Tier 1 and 2 pre-tiers.
* Massively changed all Combat Control bot stats.
* Increased the Recoil of most Pulse Guns, Magcannons and Lasers that were below 1 second recoil to 1.5 seconds for Pulse Guns/Magcannons and 1.5-2 seconds for Lasers. Chaining/Splashing lasers have been increased to 2-5 second recoil. Their overall DPS was not changed.
* Reduced the number of credit debris dropping from item damage to a maximum of 4, minimum of 2 (same value dropped).
* Made it so torpedoes don’t aim while in arming phase, range augs and mods don’t increase burn time, and sniper projectile speed bonuses increase burn time.
* Gave all ships 3 superitem slots (Capital Ships still have 5).
* Removed trade skills from the Lyceum skill reset since they can be reset through missions separately.
* Paxian Figurines no longer require Bronze.
* Added Mercurian gear to dungeon drops in Perilous Space.
* All 3 Twisted bosses will drop 2 pieces (up from 1) of Kalthi Depths loot in addition to their own respective drop tables.
* Removed the -shield aura from Dark Maelstrom in Infernal Tempest. Added the Operative as a mission reward for starting the Infernal Tempest chain (The chain starts at level 500 for the first mission, resuming at level 1000.
* Added a bunch of new voices for existing tutorial hints.
* Electrical Engineering 22: The boss, when enraged, has had it’s shield regeneration bonus reduced from +100% to +50%. The Sahvika Dhatri’s that the boss spawns have had their maximum speed reduced by 50%.
* Decreased the level requirements on twisted missions from 3k to 2k.
* Removed Quantum Brake blueprint from Perilous Space dungeon drop list (Kalthi Depths only)
* Player Progress Missions at Earthforce Frontier Station in Sol no longer have a max skill requirement on them, allowing you to complete all of them even after surpassing their goals.
* Mission-spawned zeus lackeys in EOTU will no longer dock. Increased the despawn timer from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes and decreased their damage done by 20%.
* Increased Captain Kidd’s level from 2.5k to 4.5k.
* Improved Aveksaka Xenobiology Platform with a long range weak laser for triggering the fighters.
* Added Forward Operating Base Device for low level Fleet Focus players. Deploys a drone which launches 2 fighters
* Perilous Tweaks now require a charge time and are Unique with similar type tweaks.
* Copper AI are now worth 25% of the experience they were previously worth.
* Added Cleft Claw AI to Wild and Earthforce layers.
* Lowered the number of fighters launched by the Captured Hive in Staff Quarters Pilot Farm instance.
* Added Speed Demon energy banks to the Speed Demon class base in Lyceum
* Sapphire Carrier and Sapphire Transport now have blue colouring instead of green.
* Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond and Emerald Carriers and Transports now have animated parts.
* Added 3 Focus related super items to two bases in The Nexus.
* Added new Lacerating, Burning, Smashing, Lancing, Earthshaking, Demolishing and Neutralizing weapons. They build out of Venusian/Mercurian/Solarian Pulse Guns/Magcannons/Jackhammers.
* Added Small Tamed Wasp Fighter Generator as a drop to all Hives.
* Added visual effects to all Superitem Tweaks.
* Programming is now trainable in Glass Matrix up to level 10
* Added Massif IV blueprint drop.
* Altered missile models to be more aligned.
* Added Cybernetic Supportive Machine.
* Added new Corrupted Battleship AI to Kalthi Depths.
* Added new Corrupted Cruiser AI to Kalthi Depths.
* Lowered drop rate of Expedition Team Blueprint.
* Decreased thorax deploy time on Mad Kidd drones.
* Oversized Wingship’s hullspace has been increased, and it’s resistances have been tweaked as well.
* Added new, higher tech, mission rewards to the repeatable Mira missions and increased the amount of Paxian Medallions you get from doing the daily Mira missions to 5
* Added purchasable superitem Warhead in Vervaardiger (Allows you to blow yourself up)
* Made the Blue Photon testing dummies more useful: They report their shields every 10 seconds and also report the rate their shields have changed over the last 10 seconds as well as the entire fight. In the dummies case, this is equivalent to Damage taken per second.
* Removed Key Requirements for Olympus Bosses, and removed the missions for those keys from the AI bases.
* Added Good Recovery Augmenters to the standard setup of Forgones and Icepicks
* Added North and South invulnerable warp beacons to Earthforce layer.
* Made it easier to hold aggro on Cyborg Dark Transport (Dark Barty)
* Made it easier to hold aggro on the Twisted Nikola
* Adjusted Twisted Zone drop lists to have higher chances to drop better tiered loot.
* Increased the levels of the Spice Girls, roaming Spice Pirates in Earthforce Space.
* Increased the droprate on Scorch’s Remains to 100% (from 25%)
* Added a tech 20 Starter Capital Fighter Bay to Blue Photon, and a blueprint for the normal one to dungeons.
* Beefed Grim Reaver’s damage.
* Beefed Reaver’s shield banks.

Changes to items

* All augmenter stats have been changed to accommodate for the removal of 100% Augmenter Tweaking. Your augmenters now have the stats they would have with 100% augmenter tweaking as baseline values.
* Hydra Gear no longer has a Multi-fire Bonus.
* Ruin base radars get +Range% equal to tech/2.
* Subhatta Hrdaya: Multi-fire from 25% to 0%, Range from 0% to 40%, Regen from 359 to 397.
* Augmenters with Reflectivity on them longer have the Reflectivity stat and gained this bonus in the Visibility stat
* Qa’ik Urk’qii Akk’oj augmenter: added 29% (58% after aug changes) Crit Strength
* Everlasting Ops Mastery Augmenter: -20% shield bonus (80 to 60)
* Zeus Everlasting Mode Augmenter: +20% shield bonus (60 to 80) and 5% drone ops
* Nightfury’s Anger: -10% Rate of Fire (100 to 90), -10% Damage (80 to 70), -20% Shields (140 to 120)
* Hantr Psu: -5% Speed (30 to 25)
* Twisted Death Augmenter: +20% Speed (20 to 40), Hullspace -20% (20 to 8), Weapon Hold -30% (80 to 50), Resistances +5% (-15 to -10)
* Qa’ik Vazuk Akk’oj: -40% Rate of Fire (170 to 130), +8% Damage (52 to 60), Shields -26% (166 to 140), Critical Chance +8% (-8 to 0)
* Obliteration Augmenters are receiving nerfs across all techs. The Ultimate version will be: -20% Range (60 to 40), -60% Damage (120 to 60), Crit Strength -40% (140 to 100), Resistances +10% (-26 to -16). You can expect to see nerfs along the same lines in the lower techs of these augmenters.
* Barrage Augmenters are receiving nerfs across all techs. The Ultimate version will be: -10% Rate of Fire (130 to 120), Range -20% (80 to 60), Electric Tempering +5% (-40 to -35), Crit Chance -10% (20 to 10), Weapon Hold -75% (75 to 0). You can expect to see nerfs along the same lines in the lower techs of these augmenters.
* The Harrier and Madness Augmenter lines have had their speed reduced (Ult. Harrier 90% to 60%, Ult. Madness 60% to 40%).
* Cerberus augmenter: -10% speed (up from -28%), -18% crit chance (from 0%)
* Isvasa Sattva augmenter: Tracking -60% (from -20%), Range 0% (from 46%), Shield Charge 80% (from 60%), Damage 0% (from -10%), Electric Tempering -10% (from -18%), Visiblity 200% (from 0%). This augmenter is nolonger locked to heavy fighters only.
* New Selenite Augmenter: 60% Tracking, -48% elec temp. +70% Range, +
* New Grand Moff Augmenter: 175% Shield, 40% Energy, -10% Damage, 150% Thrust, 50% Range, 100% Hostility, 50% Resists
* Bursts have been nerfed significantly, check the blog post about them for more details. (**url to that blog please**).
* Mythos Scanner: Resistance to Damage changed from 5% to 3%, Electrical Tempering changed from -5% to -3%.
* Clenches now have 6 seconds engine delay up from 3 seconds.
* Midas Touch now has 5 seconds engine delay up from 2 seconds.
* Field Amplification Device now does 100% Aura Amplification down from 350% for 5 seconds, 500 range.
* Amplified Field Amplification Device now does 300% Aura Amplification down from 750% for 5 seconds, 500 range.
* Reduced Chid energy charge from 5000 built in energy to 45.
* Grand Navigator’s Offensive Augmenter: Removed Weapon Hold and Critical Hit Strength from and Critical Hit Chance lowered to 10% from 20%, Resistance to Damage increased to 10% from 6%, Range Lowered to 30% from 40%, Tracking Lowered to 30% from 40%.
* Qa’Uka Juju: Shieldbank from 24,000 to 22,000.
* Decreased the costs of Space Blue, Constable and Enforcer gear.
* The tech level of all of the lowest tier Olympus gear (Knackered/Faulty/Damaged/Brackish/Shorted/etc) has been decreased from Tech 21 to Tech 20.
* Created Harmonic Shield Restoration Device for recon focus which boosts shield regen while out of combat.
* Returned multiple bullets to Qa Quuu Drone and Kasa Quu Drone.
* Hephaestus’ Striker and Mallet Blueprints have been changed so that they have the same requirements as Hephaestus’ Hammers.
* Buffed Dark Flaming Excommunicator.
* Adjusted the size of 1000 Monkey’s and Typewriters to 1250.
* Reduced the charge time of the Singularity Brake to 25 seconds (was 30) and increased its size to 1500 (was 500)
* Increased the charge time of the Quantum Brake to 25 seconds (was 20) and increased its size to 2500 (was 1000)
* Made Aptitude Doughnut a Damage Tweak, you will no longer be able to equip this super item with other Damage Tweak type super items.
* The Mzungu Clash now requires Nuclear Waste as fuel rather than Enriched Nuclear Waste
* The Zeus Throne inbuilt Fighter Generator is no longer sticky.
* Changed many missile’s transference resistance to 100% so they don’t get healed by drones/bases.
* Increased HUDW superitem from 20000 to 32500 damage.
* Removed energy dependency for tweaks that don’t use energy to charge. Would stop charging if low on energy.
* Aptitude, Prowess and Mastery augmenters are now Rare instead of Exotic.
* Made Maggot Cloacae and Flylet Archbreeder to 0 size (Nexus)
* Tweaked Twisted Dragon Eye radar from 28% range to 30%. Radar is slightly reduced in other areas due to balancing.
* Removed -33% range from the Indrakoza Akramavar and Indrakoza Amzuchidvar drones.
* Reduced the credit cost on various Twisted gear builds such as engines
* Reduced the energy required to charge twisted drones by 20% on average
* Removed the Neuro-bound tag from the Pirated Lyceum Combined Augmenter Research Modules.
* Increased the number of Primal Jungle Powercores used in Jungle blueprints.
* Changed the Slave Master Pod to Bot Master Pod.
* Kalthi Protection Platform (Kalthi Deployers (AI)) now has 5min lifespan instead of 100 seconds. Has lost 20% of resist and a lower tech version of the built in shield.
* Kalthi Assault Platform (Kalthi Deployers (AI)) has lost 45% damage.
* Added a noticeable ‘Industrial Commod’ cost as well as additional module requirements to the Twisted ship blueprints.
* Tweaked Twisted Dragon Eyeball to now 10% shield and 18% host. Range is remaining 28%.
* Changed the Twisted energy tractors from electrical temp to hostility.
* Reduced the damage output of Twisted Blaster drones.
* Reduced the range of the Samgrahaka Akkramvar to roughly 2500
* The Cloakpedo Mine and Hidden Cloakpedo Mine now give off a flat Shield Recharge aura instead of a percentage one.
* Added a parasite for the GUQBSC weapon.
* Class locked overloaders have been unlocked and now have a wide array of stats, which may prove useful on multiple classes.
* Increased the credit cost on Twisted cloaks and radars.
* Toned down the particle effects and decreased the spread on the Strontium Cannon.
* Increased the size, weight and power of the Bear Force and Primal Bear Force.
* Lyceum Combined Augmenters now require Infinite Knowledge for the Blueprints and the Augmenters, and have had the Periodic Credit cost for the blueprints increased.
* Made tier 0 IC into crates that return half the resources used to create them (excluding Peasants and Promethium).
* Improved Aptitude Doughnut Superitem.
* Replaced Chihuahua, Whippet and other low tech fighter sources with Fighter Generators.
* Hyperdrive Propulsion Systems 1000 now has a 15000 electricity cost over 10 seconds (up from 1500 electricity cost over 5 seconds).
* Beefed Honey Badger abit on energy regen and energy bank.
* Lowered Twisted Blaster Disaster Drone and Twisted Blaster Drone repair costs.
* Removed the laser from the Mythic Defenders
* Increased Samgrahaka Akramavar from 20% to 80% laser resistance.
* Adjusted resistances on Subspace T22 Drones, except the Bhisaj drone.
* Created Charring and Scorching Fire weaponry
* Altered the Perilous Shield Booster, Burst, Scope to not require a charge time anymore. They do however have some alterations within them.
* Altered Captain Bling and Heavy Kidd drone blueprint descriptions to contain “These drones cannot be scooped.”
* Reduced the Twisted Nikola Leech Drone’s shield bank by -80%.
* Added the Christmas Tinsels holoprojector to replace the Rudolf’s Red Nose holoprojector. Also added the added Frozen Snowflakes holoprojector.
* Base Amplifications will now automatically equip once they finish building
* Buffed Drop Missiles (The Drop AI use these missiles).
* Changed the name of the GUQSBC’s Parasite to GUWTFBBQ Parasite.
* Buffed Carcass Missile and Carcass Missile Generator, the generator can now make up to 5.
* Improved Xenos Torpedo damage by 20%.
* Given Twisted Rage Resonance 5% rate of fire.
* Glacial Freeze has been altered from 90% resis to mining to 60%.
* Super Shield Soother now has no charge timer but does negative 8% to energy charge.
* Power Doughnut has no charge time but does 15% negative recoil instead of 50%.
* Aptitude Doughnut has no charge time.
* Added Candy Corn visual for Neurotweak debris.
* Leopard Missile Launcher is now Light Fighter locked.
* Added Microscopic Dampener(s)+ to dungeon drops.

Changes to ships

* Prawn: Augmenter slots from 4 to 3, Speed from 75 to 80, Weapon slots from 4 to 6, Resist from 35% across to 40% across but 20% to Heat and Surgical, Damage from 10% to 40%, Electric Tempering from -10% to +20%, Critical hit chance from 0% to 10%, Critical hit resistance from 40% to 0%. Prawn’s Claw (inbuilt aura generator) no longer grants resistances to friendly targets and now gives -20% Range to the Prawn. The Prawn has also gained an inbuilt item called Boarding Hooks which pulls enemies toward the Prawn. This item regenerates from damage taken as well as the conventional way.
* Wattage: Speed from 83 to 85, Surgical resist from 40% to 35%, Turning from 25% to 40%, Energy from 25% to 30%, Energy recharge from 25% to 30%, Electric tempering from -25% to -30%
* Resistance (ship): Speed from 80 to 90, Weapon slots from 6 to 5, Visibility from 90 to 250, Reflectivity from 332% to 553%, Laser resist from 40% to 50%, Energy resist from 40% to 55%, Heat resist from 40% to 45%, Surgical resist from 40% to 20%, Rate of Fire from 30% to 25%, Damage from 30% to 25%, Energy regen from 30% to 20%
* Delquadrikamdon: Laser resist from 50% to 40%, Energy resist from 50% to 20%, Heat resist from 50% to 40%, Physical resist from 50% to 20%, Radiation resist from 50% to 40%, Surgical resist from 50% to 40%, Mining resist from 60% to 40%, Thrust from 20% to 0%, Tracking from 0% to 25%, Range from 0% to 75%, Radar from 0% to 50%, Damage from 20% to 25%, Electrical tempering from -20% to -10%
* Delquadrikamdan (Red Pill Delquadrikamdon): Resists from 25% across to 5% across, Turning from 20% to 0%, Tracking from 0% to -25%, Rate of Fire from 20% to 100%, Damage from 0% to 25%, Visibility from 0% to 100%, Hostility from 20% to 50%
* Hephaestus Machine and Hephaestus Crystal Machine: Augmenter slots from 4 to 3, Shield Charge from 25% to 20%, Damage from 0 to 25%, Transference Efficiency from 0 to 30%, Drone Ops from 0 to 5%.
* Hephaestus Machine+ / Ultimate Doomsday Machine: Augmenter slots from 4 to 3, Shield Charge from 30% to 25%, Damage from 0 to 30%, Transference Efficiency from 0 to 30%, Drone Ops from 0 to 5%
* Added new superitem to Hephaestus Machine and plus. Hephaestus Hospital.
* The UrQa’qa Qu’ishi Qa (Bana King playership) has received the following changes: Shield from 425% to 450%, Energy from 375% to 450%, Tracking from 35% to 0%, Rate of Fire from 32% to 23%, Range from 38% to 30%, Damage from 32% to 38%, Critical Hit Resistance from 35% to 15%, Energy Regen from 0% to 15%, juice gen from 125 to 110.
* Pax Stratos: Hull space from 1000 to 800, Shield from 500% to 450%, Energy from 500% to 450%, Critical Hit Strength from 100% to 0%, Critical Hit Resistance from 25% to 20%
* Pax Helioseta: Hull space from 1200 to 950, Shield from 600% to 500%, Energy from 600% to 500%, Tractor Strength from 25% to 0%, Critical Hit Resistance from 25% to 20%
* Rajanicar’ayu: -5% Damage (25 to 20), -10% Crit Chance (15 to 5), +5% Crit Strength (15 to 20)
* Buffed the bear so that it is a lower tech version of the Mastodon, just like the rest of the Jungle ships.
* Adding 84% more max hull and 50% more max speed to all cap ships to compensate for stats lost in new class system.
* Added the Mastodon (Serengeti Capital Ship)
* Increased the diameter of the Kalthi Warrior, Stinger, Deployer and Commanders. This includes the Armored and Wrathful versions as well.
* Changed Curse’s Twisted Fabrication inbuilt item on twisted honey from sticky to ship bound to allow the equipping of other items.
* New Twisted Honey inbuilt: Twisted Field Amplifying Device: 300% Aura Amplification for 8 seconds, 500 range
* Added new Roscap and Rosbulk
* Amoetroidizodal mining resistance reduced from 99% to 75%
* Added Blue Photon Carrier and Glaive, tech 20 mission acquirable ships that are technically inferior to the Earthforce Dreadnought.
* The Twisted Fate of Death is now a tech 22 ship (up from 21)
* Hotrod Ultimate has been moved to Micron.
* Removed sticky from Hermes Power Punch overloader.
* Added new recon tech 11 capital ships, to revive the interdiction frigate player ship.
* Gave the Hybridized Shrimp +40% Shield to keep it in line with the Shrimp and the Shrimp+.
* Equaminizer’s in-built Juice Gen has been increased to 150.
* Faranji Pulse Charger is no longer affected by Neuro Tweaking. This means you will no longer get twice the stats you should be from the aura on the Unt Faranji Wingship X.
* Added the ability for ships to get a free aug reset if the hull or augs have undergone major changes to stats. The ui for this is temporarily disabled, but until it is re-enabled you can use the chat command /freeAugReset if your ship is eligible (the game will tell you upon login or switching to the ship.

Content rebalances

+ Reduced the shield bank by roughly 40% in Twisted zone.
+ Retuned every single Kalthi Depths AI so that they are balanced against how classes will be next universe. Reduced the concentration of both Roaming and Static AI, increased the number of galaxies in Kalthi Depths to 250, decreased the Danger Factor increase per jump to 10, and increased the number of dungeons in the layer.
* Olympus Bosses have had their shield banks reduced by ~50%.
* Shielding 22 boss switches through its resistances faster, has less regeneration and heals more when you hit it with the wrong damage type.
* Decreased the Shield Bank of all Infernal Darkness minions and bosses by 50%.
* Removed the critical hit resistance from many higher tech bosses to allow for more diversity in aug setups and classes in boss fights.
* Reduced the shieldbank on Ancalagon the Black by 40%
* Reduced the shieldbank on Divine Prophet by 30%
* Increased the Shield Bank on the Kalthi Nuclear Missile by roughly3 times
* Added energy charge ability to Twisted Nikola boss
* Reduced shield bank of Twisted Fate of Death mini boss by 20%
* Altered Corrupted Cyborg Machine Master shield capacitor from 1,000,000 to 300,000 and is now only 4x more shield bank than a corrupted minion.
* Buffed Gunboat Diplomat to give 5 Superitem slots on Heavy Fighters (up from 3).
* Added Good Recovery Augmenters to the standard setup of Forgones and Icepicks.
* Fighters have been revamped, they now come from Generators. Follow this link for a full explanation: http://www.starsonata.com/announcements/upcoming-fighter-rework/
* Augmenter tweaking has been changed to 0.5% tweaking per level, slave tweaking effect has been removed (and it will get a different effect in the future) and other sources of augmenter tweaking have been halved to account for the increase to base aug stats.

Miscellaneous

+ Planets and moons can have multiple rings now.
+ Added 11 more gas giant planet textures.
+ Added rings to suns, rings will appear around 3% of suns (there is a chance some will have more than 1 ring).
+ Added more detail to sun names.
+ Made sun types more varied with giant, supergiant, hypergiant, main sequence and brown dwarf suns being generated. Suns have luminosities, temperatures and logarithmically scaled diameters that are modelled on real life.
* Added support for ctrl+A (select all) and ctrl+C (copy to clipboard) to all tables in the client (such as inventory, trade bay, ship stats, etc).
* Added the LFG chat channel for squad or team recruitment.
* Everyone online now gets their map updated when a gal is owned or unowned.
* Made it so that certain server side chat commands can be used even if the player is chat banned.
* Made it so that your current galaxy will be greyed out in the transwarp list.
* Added lifespan to the fighter/missile description.
* Clarified the xp description in missions to be more clear about reduced XP based on level.
* Added a confirmation window for when you attempt to tow a ship you have re-entered in stasis.
* Improved weapon descriptions with tracking and speed related information (tracking for lasers, turning and speed for projectiles, delay, burn and flight time for torpedoes).
* Expanded the description of the Historical Records skill.
* Updated the War Mongering player skill to state its effect.
* Removed Offensive Base slot bar from the user interface, due to future changes.
* Removed Adv Skill number indicator from the Character > Skills dialog due to new skill tree method.
* Changed the gunboat skill icon to better represent the skill.
* Added the first Space Point holoprojector to the towing station in Free Market. Googly Eyes.
* Added new textures for Flylet section of the nexus.
* Added new textures for Maggot section of the nexus.
* Updated Twisted Earth texture in the Twisted Zone
* Fixed the rotation background effect in Mother galaxies.
* Removed base export dialog due to new functionality of ctrl and c
* Made all fighters able to retarget by default.
* Fighters now follow their launchers through wormholes.
* Fighters stay out for their full time lifetime, circling their launcher while waiting.
* Fighters that can return are now given 60s to return to their launcher when their lifetime has finished.
* Fighters now are able to be moved via transwarp.

Base related changes

+ Added Module Tablet Packs to Platonic Academy which skips the sensors section. Will require IK20 skill to make the missions reveal on the Platonic Academy AI station.
+ Added new automated Titanium and Laconia sheet factories that convert raw materials into sheets.
+ All base extractors now have a unique with tag that only allows of one type of extractor stack to be equipped at one time.
+ Added new automatic mining pulse drones to Capella AI station.
* Changed targeting code to be:
** Userbases will prioritize other userbases in dps/hps.
** Drones will prioritize drones/players in dps/hps.
** RTS has been disabled userbase’s targeting code
* Hazardium, Precarium and the Unstable/Stable/Enriched/Concentrated Hazardium/Precarium/Perilium have been phased out of the game. The factories are no longer in existence and the blueprints requiring these commods have been altered to require the raw Perilium and (stages of) Admixium instead.
* The X line gear for Base Energies has been nerfed in Regeneration by 15%.
* The X line gear for Base Chargers has been nerfed in Shield Regen by 15%.
* The X line gear for Base Radars has been nerfed in Detection by 15% and Vision by 9%.
* The X line gear for Base Shields has been nerfed in Shield Regen by 15% and Shield bank by 9%.
* The X line gear for Base Lasers has been nerfed in Damage by 15%.
* Outposts can now share the team map (galaxy must be owned if it is own-able).
* Changed the size of all the base dampeners to be tech*50.
* Changed Size of base Capacitors to tech*100.
* Changed size on Base Overchargers from 5k to 500.
* Changed the size of all base gear to be: Tech * 100 * Modifier. The Modifier is either 1 for normal, 2 for upgraded, 3 for extreme.
* Added 25 Nuclear Waste to all loaded station kits.
* Added blueprints for the Station Point Defense Arrays.
* Added 2 new Station Point Defense Arrays.
* Increased base thruster sizes.
* Changed the fires on the Annihilator Pulse Gun/Primal Fury to Charring Fire. Changed fires on Ambrosia Pulse Gun to Scorching Fire.
* Base Amplifications will now automatically equip once they finish building.
* Beefed the ruin base weapons and others.
* Altered owner of user base tag to N/A.
* Reduced Expedition Team Prom terraforming from 4 Fermium slots to 2.
* Increased effect timers on base lasers by x2. For example Adamantium Superlasers.
* Buffed the stats of the Base Ruin weapons.
* Removed Class Skills requirement from Art of _ Augmenter Blueprints.
* Made the construction tab cleaner on several builds (preview: http://prntscr.com/dd5hd1)
* Changed weapon name on Bule base to be the correct one.
* Stations now also have Industrial Commod versions of blueprints such as the YZ upgrade and galaxy bound drones.
* Removed the Twisted Nikola & Twisted Death Remains requirements from the Twisted Augmenter blueprints
* Changed the Twisted Compact Drone blueprint from requiring Armada Wands to Rhino Restructuranters.
* Altered the Twisted Nikola Support Freighter blueprint to now take a Red Photon Logistics Cruiser instead.
* Increased the repair cost of Twisted drones
* Changed the build costs of Kalthi Depths: Perilous augmenter, Lunarian augmenter, Selenite augmenter, Kalthi ships, Urqa King ship, Overloaders, Control bots, Kalthi weapons, Lunarian & Selenite gear
* Drastically increased the build cost on the Fire, Furnace and Forge of the Gods energies. Also changed it so that Fire of the Gods uses Nuclear Waste, Furnace of the Gods uses Promethium and Forge of the Gods uses Enriched Nuclear waste.
* Doubled the max speed of userbases.
* Newly deployed bases will now be named after the person who deployed them, rather than “Unnamed”.
* Adjusted twisted player station kits to green glowing versions of the ada kits.

Bug Fixes

+ Solar systems that consist of a single planet with a L,T or Y class sun should no longer be formed with the planet inside the sun.
* Fixed an issue with vacuum scoops sometimes not working.
* Fixed an issue where the team recruitment dialog would ignore several team recruitment limits.
* /showslavedamage now works again, popup message for slave damage also works again.
* /showfighterdamage added also with popup messages.
* Reverted the defensive permanent drones transferences to previous rate of fire levels (RoF cap 0.1).
* Weapon self damage now correctly shows TOTAL self damage rather than per projectile.
* Fixed “Extra Tweaked” having full effect if all augs are the same.
* Made it so that bosses will ignore destroyed drones when considering if they should reset back to their initial state.
* Deathblossoms will no longer gain extra shots toward targets that they don’t think they can hit (e.g. through a planet or through a different target)
* Show healing on superitem descriptions.
* Made emp tithe only apply to ai bases.
* Fixed typo in the Art of Fast Killing blueprint.
* Fixed a typo with one of the seer parasite superitems.
* Weaponry 22 boss properly respawns his defenses after all enemies in the galaxy have been vanquished.
* Rams spawned by the roaming Hermes event will no longer drop DG drops.
* Xmas tree commod is no longer a worker.
* Fixed some kill target missions that were pointing at the spawner but not the hull.
* Removed an unlisted modifier to visibility from the Drone Deployment skill that was making permanent drones difficult to see.
* Placed AI only tags on AI only gear.
* Fixed the twitching cloud backgrounds in fly times area.
* Increased event visual sizes by 2. Example Xmas present debris graphics.
* Fixed a typo with the Rat Attack Nexus mission.
* Fixed absurd man hours and max workforce on overshirt blueprint (took 330k weeks before).
* Fixed the force thrust on the Corrupted Cyborg Reach weapon. Tool tip at present is incorrect the force thrust is only for 1 second, not 3.
* Fixed a bug where extractors that take longer than a day to extract were showing 0 in their description.
* Fixed a bug where critical hit strength and chance would apply to superitem weapons.
* Fixed termite recoil issues and damage issues caused by the player base recoil cap change.
* Fixed some issues with Temple Grounds not forcing initial starts of guards and sped up the reaction times.
* Fixed a misspell of the Bule Mentality Blueprint.
* Fixed the search box to adding another friend to your friend list dialog.
* Fixed Code Herder’s lockout in Mausoleum.
* Kalthi Sanctuary now gives Transference Vulnerability, instead of Resists.
* Changed the model for the Lyrae and the Vega to the same model that the Coronae uses, they were using the Paxian Missile model previously.
* Fixed the unable to drag the social dialog and character dialog around where no tab buttons existed.
* Fixed raging mode of Twisted Fate of Death, wasn’t smoothly adjusting.
* Aveksaka Xenobiology Research missions now ask you to bring a Pristine Alien Egg instead of a Piloting 22 commodity.
* Fixed tabbing issue with large fonts in the squad dialog.
* Fixed raging mode of Twisted Fate of Death not smoothly adjusting from green to red color transistion.
* Fixed an issue where you couldn’t use your slave’s item while docked.

Missions

+ Added repeatable turn in missions for Hazardium, Precarium, Unstable/Stable/Enriched/Concentrated Precarium, Hazardium and Perilium. You will receive the appropriate amount of credits, Perilium and Rudimentary/Middling/Advanced/Expert Admixium.
+ Added auto start tag to Weapons 20 mission upon entering Iq’ Bana DG, Equipment 20 mission upon entering Copper 8 and Shielding 20 upon entering Anaconda DG.
+ Added Remote Control 19 mission to automatically start when you enter Red Photon Research Complex.
* Fixed the summary in Rat Attack II: The Scampering mission. From 2 huge rats to 4 like the requirements state.
* Added a Dodgy Tom mission giver related to the Acoustic Frigate upgrade mission in Lyceum recon base.
* The turn in missions for the Lyceum Combined Augmenters no longer require credits, and the Confiscated missions only require one Pirated Lyceum Research.
* Added Lyceum Exploration Cruiser, Pax Latis Recta, Operative, and Blue Photon Corvette Blueprint rewards to the Subspace Monthly missions.
* The monthly Aveksaka Mission do not require you to complete previous missions, and require substantially more AI to be killed as well.
* Unlocked the Subspace monthly missions and shifted the majority of the Allied Commendations into the Pajca and Sas arm missions, the Pajca arm now gives 2 Medium Crates and the Sas arm now gives 3 Large crates.
* Altered Meeting Barbe Bleu mission to mention to proceed to Brigand’s Stronghold to continue the mission chain.
* Added clarification to the Paranormal Research Diploma Graveyard Mission chain.
* All Olympus related missions now take place in the hidden base in Olympus Entrance
* Renamed some confusing Twisted Missions
* Made all exchange scrap item missions reward raw scrap notes.

Subspace

+ The Aveksaka Monthly Invasion missions now require you to kill Aveksaka Outposts in order to complete them. They also give a very large amount of credits and experience upon completion, as well as 50 levels in the form of arm specific Epiphanies. These arm specific epiphanies provide an accelerated form of leveling, and are neuro bound. You will, however, be able to transfer them to your alts through the TSL.
+ Perilous Space Aveksaka are no longer hostile towards other Perilous Space AI.
* Massively increased the experience and credit rewards from the Subspace mission chains, in many cases this is 10x the credits and experience.
* Moved the daily mission galaxies from the Sas arm into the Pajca arm.
* Sas arm Outposts have an extra chance to drop higher tier gear, while Pajca arm Outposts have a very small chance to drop higher tier gear.
* Added Latis Recta Hybridization Blueprint to Lyceum Research Concourse.
* Tech 22 Subspace grem lasers now apply their forced turn effect for 1 second after 4 seconds, instead of 0.2 seconds every time the weapon did damage to its target.
* Buffed the Aveksaka Defender Devices, increased the cooldown and damage of the Aveksaka Plasma Devices. These changes primarily affect Hybridized ships, added the Aveksaka Regenerative Device to the Hybridized Venaticora.

Star Sonata is a game that has changed much over the past 12 years, including tons and tons of new content, both small and large in scope, and more are yet to come. But to avoid going off on tangents as I enjoy doing, let me skip straight to the actual topic of this blog post:

All content, new and old, relies on our balance sheets to be ‘balanced’. However, as the game evolves, the sheets need to be adjusted to better reflect how the perception of ‘balance’ has shifted. Sometimes, doing exactly that goes too far, while other times necessary changes are not done at all. Both extremes are unhealthy, as new additions to the game continue along the same flawed principles.

A big motivator of all these changes is to make less used weapon types viable. You should be able to pick a weapon that feels fun to use without sacrificing effectiveness. Currently, despite their shortcomings, the best weapons are so powerful that they are always worth using.

While it would be simple to give all underused weapons a buff, this is not practical. Many of these underused weapons, specifically Pulse Guns and Magcannons, are commonly used by AI. This is not the case for many of the weapons that are too powerful, which means that changing them would affect the game’s overall balance the least.

Changes to the most commonly used weapons will, of course, affect the relative difficulty of many AI. We are aware of that and have already adjusted a lot of them, often going as far as halving their effective shields.

In fact, a recent addition allows us to adjust the strength of individual AI much, much more easily, so keep that feedback coming and we’ll act on it!

Pulse Guns

Pulse Guns are the quintessential weapons of Star Sonata, but over time and over tech, they become lackluster compared to the alternatives.

There are two major issues:

Weapons have 4 parameters that determine their power: Acquisition Difficulty, Cost, Size and Weight. Size is, by far, the most impactful modifier of these 4.

Pulse Guns however get very, very big.

Due to the lackluster nature of most Pulse Guns, there haven’t been many new ones for quite some time.

The changes:

All Pulse Guns are getting their size effectively halved.

Looking forward:

Pulse Guns are meant to be the default weapon. Reasonable DPS, reasonable DPE, reasonable skill requirement. As it stands, they are not.

The change to their size will hopefully make them more usable, but it is likely that more work is required. Ideas include increased projectile speed, or smart tracking (i.e. the projectiles are fired towards where a target is going, rather than straight).

The Thorax Conundrum

The ‘Thorax’ type weapons have been part of the game since the very beginning. Their principle is simple: High damage and high efficiency, in exchange for being very difficult to hit with.

Their projectiles were made to turn towards their target while they were spinning up.

Rather than only tracking near the end of their lifespan, they now only tracked near the start of their lifespan

Jumping forward, there are now additional factors to be considered:

With higher techs come stronger augs. Range bonuses further increase the distance during which Thoraxes have tracking

Sniper projectile speed bonuses had the unintended side effect of further increasing the effective tracking of Thoraxes

All these little changes and synergies combined, a Thorax effectively became a “fire and forget” weapon. Their high damage and efficiency was no longer offset by being difficult to use.

And then, there’s also the fact that Thoraxes have not used a balance sheet since 2013. That issue is being rectified as well.

The changes:

Torpedo projectiles (and therefore Thoraxes) will no longer turn towards their targets during their spinning-up phase.

Torpedo projectiles will no longer get increased tracking distance from range bonuses. To compensate, their base tracking range was quadrupled.

There will also be some minor changes to their stats.

Looking forward:

While the changes to the mechanics of how Torpedoes work are significant, they should still be very effective low to medium range weapons in controlled environments (i.e. against stationary, large or controlled targets), but far harder to hit with at longer ranges.

Due to the unintended effects of Sniper projectile speed bonuses also increasing the effective tracking of thoraxes, Thoraxes will not currently get any projectile speed bonuses while we work on a satisfying solution.

All Thoraxes are effectively Torpedoes, but the actual Torpedoes have not been addressed. Many of them are lackluster. In fact, the AI base torpedoes (Torpedo, Torpedo I, Torpedo II) are objectively the worst weapons in the game!

As mentioned before, the balance sheet for Torpedoes and Thoraxes needs work, which will be my (s_m_w) next priority. Torpedoes are fun to use, but there are only a select few that are worth using. (And fun fact: This is only because they completely circumvented the OLD balance sheets!)

Bursts are Magcannons

When Timotheus the Red was introduced, among his drops was the ‘De-Focused Plasma Particle Distributor’, a Sebastopol (or incinerator, aka ‘RNF Burst’) with slightly less power than a normal Sebastopol, yet a significant amount of tracking.

Initially, the weapon was not considered to be very good. Its range was increased significantly and with that change an entire new weapon archetype was created: The Burst.

The concept was continued at tech 22 with the Hazardous Oomping Burst and various other types.

There were, however, two problems:

The Sebastopol balance sheet works under the assumption that Sebastopols have NO tracking and SHORT range.

All Sebastopols receive a +15% DPS bonus PER TECH, for a total of +330% DPS at level 22. This means that Sebastopols were the only weapon type that had an exponential power scaling, rather than linear. (More on this in the next section)

The added range that the RNF Burst received caused the weapon to no longer fit into the Sebastopol sheet, since it no longer had any of the characteristics that Sebastopols were supposed to have.

The changes:

All Bursts have been moved into the balance sheet for Magcannons. While we have tried to preserve their position as some of the most damaging weapons in the game, we have had to make significant changes. We have attempted to keep their DPS and size as close to live stats as possible, but they will receive a significant decrease in DPE.

Looking forward:

Magcannons and Pulse Guns with self damage are a relatively new addition to the game. The self damage aspect has not been included in the balance calculations before. While it is simple to take the same calculations that we use for Sebastopols and apply them to Magcannons and Pulse Guns, the extraneous, tech-scaling DPS bonus Sebastopols receive makes it hard to know whether that formula is reasonable. There is still room for improvement, but it is impossible to properly judge a weapon by numbers alone. Time will have to tell.

Sebastopols (including Incinerators)

Sebastopols in our balance sheets currently receive a massive bonus to their DPS scaling by tech. Since pictures say more than a thousand words, here’s what that means:

For comparison’s sake, the graph uses ‘Power’, an intuitive number to judge how ‘good’ a weapon is, calculated by multiplying DPS with DPE.

Currently, at tech 0, a Sebastopol is roughly 93% better than a Pulse Gun (due to being a more difficult to use weapon while also factoring in self damage). At tech 22, a Sebastopol is roughly 731% better than a Pulse Gun.

Sebastopols are, in fact, the ONLY weapon type that scales exponentially over tech. This is not good.

The changes:

The Cyan line shows the new scaling of Sebastopols. The extraneous +15% DPS per Tech modifier was removed. To compensate, their base power was increased by 33%. They are intended to stay very powerful, but they were magnitudes too strong.

Looking forward:

The changes to Sebastopols are, unfortunately, massive but these changes are necessary. As with all things however, the numbers do not tell the whole picture. Neither does a graph.

While there is no possible justification to retain a DPS modifier per tech, there are other ways to boost Sebastopols up more, without affecting the lower techs. Specifically, the percentual self damage could be increased for the higher tech weapons.

New Universe

As the universe is coming to a close don’t forget to pack before Saturday March 11th at 1:00 PM Eastern / Server time.

Jeff

Added 25% shield regen buff to the shield trans of the Support Drone for low level support focus players.

Made a super item for low level Fleet Focus players called “Forward Operating Base Deployment Device”. It has a very short range field gen that gives +25% shield regen and +25% electric and launches two fighters, but the base is very fragile, with the intention that you either use it out of combat to regen, or in combat, but away from the enemies.

Hober

Hober will be posting two short blogs about what has been done to Kalthi Depths and Subspace.

s_m_w

Other than doing back-end stuff to ensure that AIs don’t suddenly get super powerful thanks to the class skill changes, I’ve been digging into our balance sheets and unearthing issues and oddities, like Sebastopols getting worse DPE the more pellets they shoot.

Our experimentation with weapon balance changes, mostly focused on Thoraxes and the “Burst” line of weaponry on test continues. Expect a blog post with more details, our reasoning behind the upcoming changes, as well as our thoughts on why changes were needed in the first place in the near future.

Pixel

Pixel has been busy giving visual effects to all the tweak Superitems, here’s some examples:

He has also been working on new Tech 16, 18, 20 tier 0 base extractors for next universe last minute to encourage players to use higher tech bases as extraction kits. These will be sold in Blue Photon as blueprints. Here’s an example of metal extractors (these are subject to changes):

In-General

Everyone in general has been working towards the patch and universe reset, fixing any bugs and ironing out any potential issues that could arrise when the time comes. We’ve also updated the Steam trailer video for everyone to enjoy.

Jeff

Jeff has created a Support Drone Device that involves a Support Drone and a tech 3 weapon called “Push Back” which shoots a high velocity physical bullet with no recoil and short range. This is targeted towards ‘The Nexus’ for players to have the ability to play the support focus role by deploying this drone and healing your buddies while pushing the enemy back using the drones knockback weapon.

Darksteel

We’re changing some aspects of the commodity system of Kalthi Depths. Hazardium and Precarium are being phased out of the game as well as the Unstable / Stable / Enriched / Concentrated variants of the 2 as well as the stages of upgraded Perilium. We felt like this was unnecessary cluttering of drop tables as well as making KD builds more annoying than they really should be for no reason.

We will be making factories that will exist for one universe for the players to convert their built materials back to their raw materials EG Concentrated Hazardium –> 1 Perilium, 1 Rudimentary Admixium, 1 Middling Admixium, 1 Advanced Admixium and 1 Expert Admixium and 1 billion credits.

Pixel

Has been busy creating/splicing pixels together to create the almighty ‘Space Urchins!’, these little creatures will roam around Perilous space grappling onto their victims and exposing them to their spikey bodies. Some will inflict a lot of damage while others could provide benifical purposes… Lyceum scientists expect these to appear next universe due to the unstable nature of the fabric of space.

A new type of ship has also been created but its usage and reasoning remains a mystery!

Q/A

-13- : what is happening to Ruins at reset, specifically?
Not as far as I’m aware at this present time, apart from the current conversion of these ships which are more useful ships and will be tech 20 instead of tech 19:

Unt Faranji Wingship X

Bule Abadi Sidhe X

Golagoay Vazaha Archetype X

Kikale Mzungu Frigate X

-13- : is there going to be a patch before reset, and if so, when?
What will happen is the universe reset and patch will happen at the same time, this will result in a temporary universe for one week that will allow players to acquire the nessary class skill required for the proper universe reset. Gives everyone an equal start when the rush begins!

KangarooBlob: Could we get a comprehensive list of updates/balance changes coming in for reset please?
We will be providing a patchnote release and possibly other blog posts before this event takes place that we feel may need more context.

Chrono: Is XYZ gear being nerfed?
Only X gear has recieved a slight downgrade.

New Universe

Attention Star Sonata, on Saturday March 11 at 1:00 PM Eastern / Server time, there will be a universe reset to a 1 week temporary universe. That means that all deployed bases and the entire universe itself will be destroyed, but after a short delay, a new universe will manifest into existence. All of your ships and bots will transfer over into the new universe, but be aware of the last ship that you are in before the universe implodes, because that will be the ship you will be flying in the new universe, and you won’t want to dock all your ships in the wrong place just to switch out of your storage Thatch.

New Classes

At the same time as the universe reset, we will be patching in the new class system. The new class system moves away from all class skills being regular skills that you have to train at special locations. Instead, upon reaching certain level milestones (5, 10, 20, 40, 65, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 1000), you will be able to train a new skill from the class skill tree inside the character dialog. In addition to the new class skills which don’t cost any skill points, there are new Zen skills for each focus and class which do cost skill points and roughly equal the old skill point costs of all the previous class skills. The overall power and stats of each class is designed to be very close to the previous classes at end-game, but much more powerful and impactful at early game. We do plan to do a class rebalance later, after this new system is in place and everyone has had a good chance to try it and give feedback. When you first log in, all your old class skills will be automatically reset, and you can choose/re-choose your new class skills from the character dialog.

Another New Universe

Because of the way a lot of the AI use existing class skills, we needed to patch in the classes at the same time as a universe reset. But we don’t want to force people to deal with re-classing and building on the same day, so we are doing a 1-week temporary universe to try out the classes and maybe some other random stuff. There will be a new-new universe on March 18 at the regular time. If all goes well with the classes and the new universes, we will be announcing the official Steam launch date shortly thereafter.

Pixel

Pixel’s been busy working on a new Cleft Claw to roam around earthforce and wildspace layer. Bringing abit more hell fire to the universe.

He’s also going to start working on the base extractor changes, where only one type of each extractor can be equiped for next universe.

Hober Mallow

On test are also some changes to a variety of Pulse Guns, Magcannons and Laser Beams. Many of these weapons that had less than 1 second rate of fire now have between 1 and 1.5 second rate of fire (this is especially true of the Speed Demon locked weapons like the Hell Raiser, and other weapons that impart parasites/fires). The reasoning behind these changes was to preserve their DPS (they have the exact same DPS listed on the weapons) while enabling Speed Demons and other fast rate of firing characters to use the weapons without wasting DPS due to the rate of fire cap. It should be very hard, if not close to impossible, to hit the rate of fire cap with them now. Weapons that chain or splash, have been increased to 2-5 seconds as well. This was to make the Gunner weapons feel more thematic and heavy hitting. Let me know how these changes feel, or what effects they have on your setup.

Dark Steel

Dark Steel, mainly went over with the rest of the development team what Augmenters should be given a unequip due to changes.

This also applies to the following ships to recieve a free Augmenter reset:

Prawn

Resistance

Hephaestus Machine

Wattage

Delquad

Q/A

Masterful: Reset? Still in the works sadly as we’re still sorting out issues. The current goal is sometime March but don’t take this as a solid deadline.

Chrono: Are termites being more buffed again ontop? Yes next universe they’ll be unleashed into the wild to test your resolve!

SunDog60

I’ve been working on collecting bug reports and getting them fixed with the help of Egrosphere. If you know of any obscure bugs that we may not know about, please feel free to contact me on Discord and let me know about them.

Red

Red’s been working on making various missions such as the tech 20 skill missions auto-start when you get to the boss zone.

Ingendum

Ingen’s been busy working on spawners and tracking down bugs in the new class system to get them all tested and fixed. More testing for this new system on the test server would be very helpful to getting this system complete and ready for universe reset.

Unfortunately for readers, much of what was discussed and done was for internal changes such as changes to spawners that won’t affect gameplay, as well as more tweaks and changes for the upcoming class system change.

Bobbo

Bobbo’s been working on fixing universe generation issues (issues arising from the addition of Kalthi Depths to the universe, mainly).

JeffL

When a new userbase is deployed by a player, instead of being an unnamed kit, it will now display the owner’s name initially.

Deathblossoms will no longer fire at every target within range (to the maximum target count they can achieve). If your deathblossom does not think it can hit an enemy within range, it will not target them. This will not affect ethereal weaponry (because if you are in range, an ethereal weapon will go through obstacles and other enemies to hit the target), this will affect non-ethereal weaponry and as a result mainly projectile weaponry.

Community Meeting

Hober will be having a conversation with the playerbase about Kalthi Depths loot on Friday February 3rd 2017 at 3PM EST.

Click the flailing rat to join the conversation.

Hober Mallow

Hober has finished the first pass on all of the Kalthi Depths AI, the new AI should be put on test shortly for your testing pleasure.

Hober has convinced the rest of the development team that blueprints requiring Station Management by the player equipping them was unnecessary. Going forward, they will require the appropriate level of Equipment for a player to equip them to a base.

Finally, he will be adding one time missions for the majority of non Serengeti Tech 20 ships. These missions will have (roughly) the same requirements as the blueprints. This change is meant to allow players who do not have a Wild Space presence to continue progressing through content.

Pixel

Pixel is having some technical difficulties.

enkelin

enkelin applied his renowned mathematical wizardry to the Gunner Analyzer. It should be up and running on the test server sooner rather than later. He has also come up with a brilliant plan that will solve all of our BvB woes… but he’s not ready to share it yet.

Bobbo

Working on Gunner Analyzer, courtesy of enkelin.

JeffL

Created a cool new Speed Demon super item that increases Shield Regeneration out of combat! Otherwise, he is working on things behind the scenes.

MicroCapacitor

Looking into potential issues with resistances and soaks.

Jey

He has been diligently hunting down bugs, and patching vulnerability issues. He was able to get the client to a point where it passed all of his stability tests. Out of the 183 dmps that were sent in the past 2 months, 164 of them are confirmed to be fixed by his changes. The rest were crashes without sufficient information, so they may or may not be fixed.

He has narrowed down the root of the graphical glitch that causes engine particle effects to display on things they shouldn’t, now he has to figure out the best way to fix it.